


Fire and Ice

by greygerbil



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-29
Updated: 2018-10-29
Packaged: 2019-08-09 09:58:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16447670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/pseuds/greygerbil
Summary: Sir Michele would do anything to save his dying sister, even make a pact with the feared witch of the Darkwoods, Georgi Popovich. However, when the time comes for the witch to collect his payment, Michele finds Georgi is not what he seemed.





	Fire and Ice

**Author's Note:**

> For Spookyweek 2018, Day 2: Witches/Warlocks

“There must be something you can do to help her!”

Michele stopped pacing the room and levelled his furious gaze at the woman sitting at his sister’s bedside. Folding her hands in her lap, she shook her head.

“I’m sorry, Sir Michele, but as I told you, the sickness is in her blood now.”

Running both hands through his hair, Michele swallowed the curses on his tongue. He had gathered every healer in the city and ridden as far as he dared to go from his sister’s side to bring others from neighbouring towns, but no one had been able to give him more than feeble words of hope that perhaps she would be able to fight off the illness and recover on her own. She had not, of course. Instead, as the days passed, Sara had grown weak and speechless with fever and eventually closed her eyes and not opened them again. All that was left now to show she wasn’t already dead was a faint breath that Michele worried might stop at any moment.

“Do you know someone else – anyone else I could ask?” he implored the healer.

Though he wasn’t willing to admit it to himself yet, he knew in his heart his begging was useless. Tsar Yakov himself, who had heard of his sister’s plight, had sent this woman down from his castle. Who in the whole of the Winter Country would know more about healing than her if she was good enough for the court of the mightiest man in the land?

The woman turned to look at Sara and back at Michele and then at her hands once more.

“You only moved up from the south a couple of years ago, isn’t that right, Sir?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” Michele asked, exasperated.

“It means you don’t know everything about this place yet. There is someone – something that might help you. But I’m not sure it’s wise to tell you. I could very well be sending you to your death.”

Michele’s heart jumped into his throat.

“I don’t care!” he said with full conviction. “What is it?”

The woman measured him with her gaze and gave a quiet sigh.

“You know the Darkwoods to the north of the city, don’t you? On the side of the hill they cover, at the foot of the Broken Cliff, lives a witch.”

“A real witch?” Michele asked, taken aback.

Many centuries ago, valiant knights had rid the world of the cruel, powerful witch kings and queens, and since then magic had grown thin in the veins of humans as no one was left to pass down the cursed gift that was said to twist the mind of its user irrevocably to evil. Every once in a while, however, it still sprung up and those carriers were feared like creatures of nightmare by every reasonable man and woman.

“Yes,” she said.

“How come Tsar Yakov hasn’t sent knights to kill the witch if you know where it is?”

“No crime could be proven to be his doing yet and so Tsar Yakov says he has no reason to have him executed by the laws of the land. He has always been steadfast that way.” The healer sighed. “Well, who can really tell with a witch? I confess I wish the tsar would root him out regardless. Either way, the people speak many rumours about him. I couldn’t tell you which are really true, but taken altogether it seems that he is a powerful sorcerer. If there was something you could offer him in exchange for his help, maybe… but I have no idea if he would even consider it, or what he would ask as payment. Dealing with a witch is never a wise idea.”

 _To hell with wisdom_ , Michele thought as looked at Sara’s face, pale and damp and sunken. There was no question for him, no matter if the thought of facing down a witch made his blood run cold. He would do anything for her.

-

Michele had wasted no time to saddle his mare and chase her out the city gates as fast as her hooves would carry them, and had kept her on as steady a course as he could even on the treacherous ground of the forest. With the wind rushing in his face, slapping branches out of his way, he hadn’t had much time to think about anything but moving forward. However, as the last remnants of a path were lost and the trees stood so close together he had to slow down to a trot, with only spots of the dying day’s light pushing between the leaves like lost fireflies, he heard his own heart thumping over the crackling in the underbrush. What would he do if the witch killed him? Sara would be all alone… but, then again, Sara would likely not even open her eyes again before she herself succumbed to death. Michele was serving her better out here than by sitting in her chamber watching her waste away.

The thick forest parted before him eventually, just as Michele worried he might have lost his way, and he saw the grey, moss-covered mass of the Broken Cliff to his left, a jutting piece of rock a hundred feet or so tall that stretched jarringly out of the mountainside. Following along its side downwards, he found himself looking at a small glade sitting in the shadow under the tip of the rock, with a hut in the middle.

Quietly, Michele slid out of the saddle and tied the reins of his horse to a branch, scanning the area. All was quiet. The skew-whiff house crowded against the mass of the Broken Cliff was piled up of uneven stones and topped with a thatched roof. A garden laid before it surrounded by a low wall. There were plants Michele had never seen, flowers that bloomed in ten different colours, thin, tall mushrooms with blue hats, a small tree carrying more curled branches than leaves; but he also saw cabbages and carrots and the well-known reddish shade of grape vines that grew up the walls of the house.

Michele took an uncertain step forward onto the meadow. That very same second, something shot up in the corner of his eyes like a snake. It wrapped around his armoured arms before Michele could jump backwards and held him tightly in place as he tried to step away. Astonished, he saw that it was wild roses that had wrapped around his elbows.

“That’s close enough, knight.”

The voice that came from the house was deep. Michele stared at the withered wooden door, which had opened an inch. The inside of the hut was too dark to make out anything, but Michele knew he was being watched.

Everything in him wanted to tear free and grab his sword, but he reminded himself of his reasons for coming here and took a deep breath instead.

“Please, witch,” he said, forcing his voice calm. “I need your help.”

“My help?” the voice asked. “I think you rather want my head to show to the tsar, that’s what I believe. What are you accusing me of now? I haven’t even been down from the mountain in weeks!”

“No, it’s not that!” Michele called. “I promise you, I’m not here to hurt you! A healer told me of you and you’re the only one left I can ask!”

There was a pause before, slowly, the door opened inch by inch until a man stepped out into the twilight of the cold autumn afternoon. Once more, Michele found himself staring in surprise. He’d expected someone old and withered, face twisted with disgust for the world and its inhabitants by the dark power within him, maybe with fangs and claws. Instead, he was looking at a handsome man who could barely be older than himself with short, dark hair and blue eyes that regarded Michele with nothing worse than doubt. He was wearing a robe trimmed with feathers and stitched with shimmering silver thread that looked like water in the fading sunlight, and while the fabric was a little worn, it was obvious his clothes were well-taken care off. The skin of his eyelids was blackened with coal the way the ladies of the court would sometimes do it, making his eyes look bigger, the white in them starker. He looked more like a merchant from a foreign land than a witch king.

“You must be very brave or desperate to come up here alone. Not many do,” the witch muttered. “You don’t look sick, though.”

“It’s my sister,” Michele said, allowing his arms to go slack in the thorny grip of the vines despite his best instincts. “An arrow hit her. The wound festered, the fever grew worse, and now she won’t even wake up.”

“Is that so?” The witch looked him up and down. “What’s your name?”

“Michele Crispino.”

Michele had once heard that a witch could do all manner of things to you once they knew your name, but he didn’t have the luxury to attempt lying to him. Too much was at stake here. What if the witch could tell he wasn’t saying the truth and grew angry at him?

“I’m Georgi Popovich,” the witch said.

Michele had no idea why it surprised him to hear such a normal name for these lands. Even a witch was born to parents, after all. They must have called him something.

“Will you come with me to help me?” he asked. “I’ll do anything you want. I’ll be your servant, you can have my life in exchange for hers if that’s what it takes. I just need my sister to get better.”

The witch’s gaze softened a bit. “She means a lot to you.”

Michele bit his tongue. Suddenly, there were tears closing up his throat. He forced them down. Knights didn’t cry.

“I came into the world with her. If she leaves before me, I could as well go with her.”

“It might not have to come to that. I will help you.”

Michele swallowed.

“What’s your price?”

The witch thought for a moment.

“You _are_ asking me to come down into town, which is dangerous for me, and I don’t even know if you sister exists or not, so there will be something. I could use help with a ritual,” he added, after another moment’s contemplation.

His own life he could give up, but what if the witch asked him to harm someone else? Steal a baby for him and bring it up to his cauldron? Michele hesitated, thought of the way Sara would look at him if she knew what crimes he was considering for her sake. Her death would be his death, but he could not disappoint her like that, either.

“I’ll do whatever you want, but it can’t involve the life of anyone but me. I’m a knight, I can’t hurt an innocent.”

“It won’t. You asked for my help, no one else. You pay,” the witch said.

The roses released their death grip on his arms. Michele shook out his hands, looking at the witch.

“You have to come right now. I don’t know how much time Sara has left.”

“Untie your horse,” the witch said as he walked back into the hut. When he re-emerged, he had pulled a drab black travelling cloth over his clothes, the hood drawn deep into his face. Michele made room for him when he approached the horse.

“You can sit in the front,” he said.

He didn’t want a witch in his back where he couldn’t see him, that was for sure.

The witch pulled himself up and Michele sat behind him, reaching around him for the reins. His hand brushed against the witch’s as he did so and he found it warm. For some reason he had always thought a witch would have skin as cold as a fish.

His passenger was quiet as they picked their way through the forest and Michele didn’t know what to say to a witch, either. Since he’d already agreed to help, every extra word ran the risk of diverting him from that decision. Michele kept his mouth shut.

-

By the time they had arrived back in town, it was dark and no one paid them much heed. Michele stopped before the stable at the small house he had bought with Sara when they had moved up here to the north and handed the horse to his servant before hurrying inside.

Sara laid exactly how he had left hours ago, as if time had not passed in this room. Michele had to step close to the bed to check that she was still breathing at all. The witch followed and brushed off his hood as he did so.

“Your sister is weak,” he said, not unkindly.

“She hasn’t been awake for two days. She can’t eat or drink... if the sickness won’t kill her, that eventually will,” Michele said, hands balled to fists.

The witch sat by the side of her bed and took Sara’s hand to feel her pulse. Michele bit down on the reflexive impulse to pull him away. He was a witch, after all, not even really a human man, and he was here to help.

“You said she was hit by an arrow. Where?”

Michele peeled back just as much of the blanket and dress covering Sara as he had to, exposing her left shoulder. The wound had grown strangely black, like tar had congealed there instead of blood. The witch looked at it for a long moment and then reached forward to pull the skin around the wound taut. There were small black tendrils growing around it that Michele had noticed before but didn’t know what to make of.

“This is strange to see in this land. Who was she fighting?”

“Bandits... I think they came from all the way up from the sea.”

With some satisfaction, the witch nodded his head. “That is what I thought! Your sister was poisoned, but this kind is not usually found around here. The Fallow Spear tribes coat their arrows with it, though. I’ve only seen a wound like this once before.”

“So you can you help her?!” Michele asked, grabbing the witch’s shoulder. He pulled back his hand just as quickly, but the witch didn’t remark on his outbreak at all.

“I think so.”

The witch reached under his coat. Michele had noticed while they rode that there was a soft bump at his right side which was now revealed to be a round leather bag. Digging through it, the witch pulled out a small glass bottle.

“I need water.”

Immediately, Michele ran to get a jar from the kitchen, where a fresh bucket full of water from the well stood by the fireplace. As he returned, the witch had already laid out some dried herbs and flowers on the table in the middle of the room. He took the jug from Michele and filled his phial almost to the top, then crumbled the dried ingredients into the water. Finally, he pulled a small, sharp-looking knife out of his bag and cut a thin red line along his arm, draining a few drops of blood into the bottle, too. He pointed the knife at Michele next.

“Now you,” he said. “Mine for magic, yours for power. The stronger your bond to her is, the more likely it is you will be able to help her.”

“She is my twin. There is no stronger bond,” Michele said quietly as he held out his hand. A nick on his thumb that made him flinch just briefly apparently produced enough blood for the witch to be satisfied. He pushed a cork into the bottle, shook it briefly for the ingredients to mix, and placed it back on the table before him to envelop it in his hands.

Light poured out between his fingers as if a flame had been lit in the murky, pink water. Michele had to avert his eyes. When the light in the room receded and Michele dared to turn back, the water was as clear as if it had just been brought from the brook – no hue of blood mixed in and no floating debris of crushed leaves and stalks. He was still stunned as the witch handed the phial to him.

“Put this on her wound and wait until morning,” he said, rising from his chair. “If she gets better, I expect you at my hut this day in a week. You should know if it has helped by that time. If you won’t come, I’ll come for you.”

“I’m a knight. I never break my promises,” Michele told the witch.

The witch just cocked his head before pulling the hood back over it. He was out of the door before Michele thought to thank him or ask him how he would get back home.

-

Michele sat by his sister’s side all night, never even dozing. He hadn’t thought that one could stay awake two, three nights in a row – at this point he barely knew anymore –, but sleep just didn’t come and Michele would rather hold vigil, anyway. In truth, he knew that all he was doing was sitting around, highly aware of how useless he was, but still, he could not bear to leave Sara alone in this state.

He was hanging in the chair by Sara’s bed in the early grey of the morning light, watching her motionless body as he’d done for hours, when suddenly she turned her head and coughed, once. The sound was small and scratchy and the gesture miniscule, but it was the most Michele had seen out of her in days.

With baited breath, Michele now found himself waiting for every new sign of life. At first, there was a twitch of her hand, a shift of her foot under the blanket, and a flutter of her eyelids. Still marvelling over those little movements, the sudden start with which Sara sat up had Michele jumping. With an unsteady hand, she grasped at her throat.

“I’m so thirsty,” she mumbled, still half conscious, voice rough.

Michele grabbed the jug on the table, which was still filled with the water the witch hadn’t needed, and helped her drink. Her gaze became a little clearer after she’d sat there for a while staring at the wall.

“Mickey?” she asked, eventually. “What happened?”

Michele could only surge forward to close her in his arms.

-

By evening, Sara was out of the bed and walking on unsteady legs, against Michele’s wishes, but to his great relief regardless. She remembered barely anything from after the arrow hit her, even though she had been conscious for some days after.

“And it was poison, you say?” she asked, picking at the remains of the dinner their servant had made for them. She had cleaned the chicken meat down to the bone.

“Yes, that’s what the healer told me.”

Michele had already made the decision that Sara needn’t know what pact he’d made to save her life. She would only try to help him and he didn’t want her involved with the witch, even though Michele had to admit so far that strange man living out in the woods had done nothing especially threatening. Still, this was the boon, after all, the price was still to pay. He’d made peace with that already, though. Sara was better. What more could he want?

“Who was the healer who helped me in the end? I would like to thank them.”

“He isn’t from around here,” Michele lied. “His name is Georgi Popovich.” Though he’d never used the name of the witch in his head, it came in handy now, allowing him not to have to make up a new one he had to remember. “Maybe you can meet him if he ever passes through town again.”

-

A week later, Sara had already returned to donning her armour and training with the tsar’s knights, and the night of the reckoning had come. Michele told his sister that he would be out patrolling the border of the forest on the orders of the captain of the city guard, Nikolai Plisetsky, surprised her by hugging her tightly goodbye, and then left, hoping that he would return.

The ride through the forest was, despite everything, not as frightening as it had been the first time. His own life and honour might hang in the balance, but none of it could be as terrifying as the thought of losing Sara. As he came up to the witch’s house, he found him kneeling in the garden in the light of a lantern that held no candle, just a ball of white flame, like he’d captured a star. He looked up as he heard the noise Michele’s horse’s hooves made on the forest ground.

“There you are. I was wondering if you’d come.”

“I told you, I’m a man of honour. I never go against my word.”

The witch brushed the dirt of his hands. He seemed to have been pulling weeds from between a row of carrots.

“Your horse should get inside while we work. A pack of wolves has been sneaking around here for the past few weeks.”

He closed the garden gate behind himself and walked past the first door into his tiny hut to a second, broader one. Inside the room it opened to, Michele saw strange statues carved of wood and stone in the dozens, creatures that were half animal and half human. He patted his horse on the neck before he jumped off her back and tied her up in there. For a moment, he half expected her to shy away, but if the statues had any evil aura around them, she didn’t seem to feel it. Maybe Michele was imagining it, after all. The witch closed the door on the horse.

“What is it you want me to do?” Michele asked.

“It’s a full moon,” the witch said gravely. “The perfect time to charge artefacts with magic. Here, hold this.”

With these words, he handed Michele a smooth green stone. Michele felt its cool surface against his palm.

“You channel the power the moon gives all living things into this together with your life energy.”

“Will it take _all_ my energy?” Michele asked. “Am I going to die?”

The witch seemed to just stop himself from rolling his eyes.

“I have no desire to kill anyone, knight. Do you still not understand that?” he asked. “Come.”

Michele followed the witch up the steep incline next to the cliff that stuck out over his hut. He was not wearing the travelling cloak now and Michele noticed that his dark, feather-studded robes were tailored to compliment his body’s form. He wondered if he had sown them himself, if he paid attention to such things as looking good even with no one around to see him. The witch was, in fact, quite beautiful in the pale light of the magic lantern and the moon above. Briefly, Michele wondered if the witch was hexing him, but had to admit to himself he was not the first handsome man who had caught Michele’s eye. It was something Michele tried not to think about too often, but it definitely didn’t need a spell.

When they had reached the top of the Broken Cliff, the witch walked to the edge overlooking the forest and sat down in the grass. Slowly, carefully, Michele sat down beside him, laying his sword down by his side.

“You can see the town from here,” Michele noted, regarding the lights in the distance. The villages laid in darkness this late at night, but there were always fires on in the capital, no matter how late it got. The tsar’s castle rose as a shadow above the city walls.

“Yes,” the witch said and gently sat the lantern down in the grass between them. “It doesn’t seem to ever sleep. I like to come up here to look at it. I wonder what it’s like to live in such a place...” He glanced at Michele. “Was it as busy where you come from?”

“Napoli wasn’t much smaller.” Michele had no idea why the witch wanted to know, but figured there was no harm in telling him. “It’s a beautiful place, even though the city sits by the side of a volcano.”

The witch gasped softly.

“Oh, that’s a powerful magic! The children of Napoli must be full of fire.”

“Well, my sister and me are not mages.”

“That doesn’t matter. Everyone and everything carries magic in them. Humans draw it from the nature around them when they are born,” the witch explained. “It’s just that sometimes people can channel that force, like I do. But you are still a creature of magic regardless.”

Michele looked down at himself with disquiet and the witch laughed at him.

“It won’t burst out of you, I promise.”

“What is your... kind of magic?” Michele asked, a little less intimidated now. When the witch sat there talking, he looked just like any young man, despite the odd clothes and coal around his eyes.

“I was born in a winter storm. It’s all ice and air,” Georgi said, pressing a hand to his chest.

“And your parents, were they witches?”

“No. They found out when I was a child and threw me out for fear of drawing an angry mob down on themselves and my siblings. I wandered for a long while and ended up here. Tsar Yakov is very just, so he’s allowed me to stay after I was found out. I considered moving on, but... this is as safe as it gets for me.”

The witch looked out over the forest. Michele tried not to show his surprise. He’d always assumed that witches wanted to live out in the woods to rid themselves of the company of humans, but this one looked wistful as he gazed towards the city.

Georgi, he thought to himself. It was easier to think of him as Georgi like this.

“Why did you leave Napoli?” Georgi asked into his thoughts.

Michele hesitated. Sara and him had told only the ones who really needed to know, but then again, no one really spoke to the witch and the shame and anger still burned in his heart sometimes, making him want to confess.

“Three years ago, my father killed a man over a game of dice,” Michele said. “He was a knight and so were many in my family, but he was not the first of us to dishonour himself, either. After he was sentenced to death at the gallows, my sister and me were cast out of town. We travelled north until we could go no further.” He shook his head. “The Summerland is made up out of city-states and we could have stayed in another place there, with another lord, but we wanted to leave it all behind.”

“I’m sorry,” Georgi said.

“Our old lord was tired of my family because so many of my ancestors were little more than brigands, too, even though they were all knights. The Crispino family had a well-deserved reputation,” Michele continued quietly before looking up. “But I want to prove that their heritage is not in our blood. I will uphold all the virtues of a knight! I’ll watch over people and show them I deserve my title.”

Georgi smiled at him with no trace of irony, which Michele faced so often from people when he told them of his ambitions to become an example of knighthood.

“There aren’t many knights who take their oaths so seriously. What does it matter, in the end, who you’re the offspring of? My parents weren’t witches and yet I am one. If something so big can just appear out of nowhere, then a knight can come from a family of robbers and murderers.”

“Yes... I guess so,” Michele said, smiling slight as he fingered the stone. It was warm now from resting in his hand, but he didn’t feel any weaker at all. He’d expected to notice his energy being sapped. Looking up, he directed his gaze upwards.

“You really can see every star out here,” he said, thoughtfully.

“Yes, when the nights are...”

Georgi interrupted himself as the howl of a wolf sounded in the distance. Michele straightened, reaching for the sword lying next to him in the grass, but Georgi waved him off.

“Don’t worry, they’re probably just at my house. The gods know what keeps leading them there.” He wrinkled his nose. “We can probably wait them out. They usually go west, try to get into the pastures of the farmers there. Make sure to stay south on your way back to the city or they might try to hunt you.”

“Couldn’t you keep them away from your house with your vines?” Michele asked. “It worked on me.”

Georgi shrugged his shoulders. “Sadly, those are my best trick, and it’s easy enough to tear through them for an animal crazed with pain. Even you could probably have done it if you had really wanted to. I guess I could conjure a fire, but I might accidentally setting the whole forest ablaze. I’ve always been more interested in potions than spells, anyway.” He paused, grimaced. “I probably shouldn’t have told you this. The fear that keeps the knights away is my best defence.”

“You helped my sister. I wouldn’t tell,” Michele said. Not when the worst he’d had to do for payment was hold a stone for a bit. Very little about Georgi seemed dangerous, to be true. Maybe he was being deceived, but he had no idea what Georgi would gain from doing that. Michele was hardly the knight with the most sway at court and Tsar Yakov was already on Georgi’s side.

“You really are chivalrous,” Georgi said with a smile that made Michele feel weirdly warm inside.

They sat in the grass in amicable silence until the howls had vanished in the distance and quiet was restored to the Darkwoods. Georgi got up.

“I won’t keep you all night,” he said.

Michele thought that he wouldn’t have minded sitting here watching Georgi a bit longer.

They descended the precipitous side of the cliff once more and walked back to Georgi’s house, where he unlatched the door to the room they had used as a stable. Michele led his horse out and then held the stone to Georgi.

“Here it is. I didn’t really feel anything while we sat up there, though.”

Georgi snorted. “No, I don’t imagine you would have. You can keep the stone if you’d like. I don’t need it.”

“What?” Michele asked, brow drawn in confusion. “What do you mean? What was the point of it, then?”

Georgi glanced at the toes of his boots.

“It’s very lonely out here,” he murmured after a moment. “I just wanted to watch the stars with company for once and you seemed like a good person, being so concerned for your sister. I didn’t think you would do it without an explanation, so...”

Georgi was red in the face now and Michele stared at him in silence. What an odd witch! An odd man. But maybe it was stupid of him to be so surprised. If he allowed that Georgi was not some dark witch king, but simply someone born with magic powers who only kept to himself to stay out of trouble, not because he didn’t like people, it was natural that he would feel lonely. Much like Michele he had been thrown out, but there was nowhere for him to go to begin anew and he had no Sara by his side.

It would be a lie to say that Georgi could have just asked Michele to come and would not at least have been met with confusion. He’d have suspected a trap. However, having talked to him now, Michele thought he might know better.

“You know... since you haven’t killed anyone, and in fact you saved my sister’s life, there’s really no reason to think you’re anything but one of Tsar Yakov’s people,” Michele said, slowly.

Georgi gave a slow nod, though he looked uncertain.

“So in that case, a knight really should make sure that you’re safe out here every once in a while, since it’s our job to protect the people of the realm and there’s dangerous animals and everything. You know, the wolves...”

For some reason, he now found himself getting flustered from the way Georgi’s stared at him, blue eyes wide with disbelief. He grabbed his horse’s reins tightly and cleared his throat.

Georgi placed his hand over Michele’s and for all the ice that he claimed was in him, Michele thought it felt searing hot on his skin.

“That would be very kind of you,” he said, voice brimming with happiness.

As Michele rode away into the night-time forest, he was still clutching the green stone in one hand.


End file.
